Two teams of astronomers have discovered the largest and farthest reservoir of water ever detected in the universe.

Looking from a distance of 30 billion trillion miles away into a quasar - one of the brightest and most violent objects in the cosmos - the researchers, led by scientists at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), have found a mass of water vapour that's at least 140 trillion times that of all the water in the world's oceans combined, and 100,000 times more massive than the sun.

Because the quasar is so far away, its light has taken 12 billion years to reach Earth. The observations therefore reveal a time when the universe was just 1.6 billion years old.

"The environment around this quasar is unique in that it's producing this huge mass of water," says Matt Bradford, a scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), and a visiting associate at Caltech."It's another demonstration that water is pervasive throughout the universe, even at the very earliest times."

Scientists working at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) may have gotten their first look at the so-called "God particle" -- the fabled massive elementary particle known as the Higgs boson -- according to BBC News reports published Friday.

According to BBC Science Correspondent Ian Sample, officials at the Geneva-based particle physics laboratory announced the possible discovery during the 2011 Europhysics Conference on High-Energy Physics (HEP 2011), which opened Thursday in Grenoble, France.

"Speaking at the meeting, teams working on two of the collider's huge detectors, Atlas and CMS, independently reported unusual bumps in their data that could be the first hints of the particle," Sample reported.

"Physicists stressed that it was too early to know whether the signals were due to the missing particle," he added. "Bumps that look like new discoveries can be caused by statistical fluctuations in data, flaws in computer models and other glitches, they said."

"We cannot say anything today, but clearly it's intriguing," Fabiola Gianotti, spokeswoman for the 3,000-strong Atlas team, told BBC News, adding that they would know more after CERN personnel from both the Atlas and CMS teams were able to obtain more information and compare their results.

An ambitious experiment to make a glass sphere exist in two places at once could provide the most sensitive test of quantum theory yet. The experiment will place a sphere containing millions of atoms - making it larger than many viruses - into a superposition of states in different places, say researchers in Europe.

Physicists have questioned whether large objects can follow quantum laws ever since Erwin Schrödinger's thought-experiment suggested a cat could exist in a superposition of being both alive and dead.

The idea is to zap a glass sphere 40 nanometres in diameter with a laser while it is inside a small cavity. This should force the sphere to bounce from one side of the cavity to the other. But since the light is quantum in nature, so too will be the position of the sphere. This forces it into a quantum superposition.

The experiment will have to be carried out in high vacuum and at extremely low temperatures so that the sphere is not disturbed by thermal noise or air molecules, says lead author Oriol Romero-Isart from the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Garching, Germany.

Scientists have created more than 150 human-animal hybrid embryos in British laboratories.

The hybrids have been produced secretively over the past three years by researchers looking into possible cures for a wide range of diseases.

The revelation comes just a day after a committee of scientists warned of a nightmare Planet of the Apes scenario in which work on human-animal creations goes too far.

The 1960 debate between presidential candidates John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon altered America's view of political competition. Expectations grew, as candidates not only needed to say the right thing, but also look the part. In addition, the event marked the first time a debate could be watched within the comforts of home -- and viewers liked what they saw from one Democratic hopeful.

It's obvious that physical appearances still influence viewers' perceptions of political candidates. But are some people easier to charm than others?

A recent study published in the American Journal of Political Science suggests that people who are less informed about politics and those who are heavy TV watchers tend to make more political decisions based on the attractiveness of candidates.

Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology drew data from two U.S. surveys of more than 36,000 people that measured respondents' political knowledge, TV behavior and voting preferences when shown candidates with differing appearances.

Many modern-day humans may be carrying around a fragment of Neanderthal DNA on one of their sex chromosomes, a new study finds.

The research adds a piece of corroborating evidence to the theory that Neanderthals and humans interbred sometime after humans migrated out of Africa between 50,000 and 80,000 years ago. The DNA fragment, found on the human X chromosome, is present in 9 percent of humans across the world from Asia to Europe to America - except in Africa, where it does not appear.

"It's in the Middle East, it's in Europe, it's in Eurasia, it's in America, it's in Australia," study researcher Damian Labuda of the University of Montreal told LiveScience. "This one event which led to this on the human X chromosome has to occur very early after modern man left Africa."

There is no death certificate for Jesus of Nazareth - and many believe that he still lives on in a spiritual sense. But that hasn't stopped physicians and medical scholars from trying to diagnose the exact physiological mechanisms that caused the crucified revolutionary to die 2 millennia ago. Now, an American doctor has offered a new hypothesis involving Christ's blood-clotting ability - but other researchers are skeptical.

"As a kid going to church, I'd heard that Jesus died of a 'broken heart,' " says Joseph Bergeron, a private physician associated with The Pain Clinic in Terre Haute, Indiana. But that idea - technically known as the "cardiac rupture" hypothesis, and first published in 1847 by British physician William Stroud - "didn't really make sense, given what we know about the crucifixion." Bergeron became even more intrigued after he was asked to speak to a group of Christian medical students and started looking for a topic that they might find interesting. He discovered that a flock of researchers have tried to explain exactly how Jesus died, and "I just couldn't stop reading," he says.

There are at least six major hypotheses about Christ's death, Bergeron notes in a paper published online this month in the Journal of Forensic and Legal Medicine. Beatings and the stress associated with being nailed to a cross could have caused a blood clot to block a vessel in Christ's lung, for example, leading to death by pulmonary embolism. Other possibilities are that he was unable to breathe due to his awkward hanging position and suffocated, or that he went into lethal shock - ideas supported by studies of what has killed modern torture victims. And although the Bible's book of John reports that Roman soldiers found that Jesus was already dead when they removed him from the cross, it's possible he wasn't and that the final blow was a subsequent spear thrust to his chest that caused a "sudden flow of blood and water," Bergeron writes, quoting from the New Testament. "The idea ... is based on the assumption blood cannot flow from a corpse."

A scientific detective story if there ever was one, Slava Turyshev of JPL and his colleagues have spent years tracking down their villain, the Pioneer Anomaly: an unexplained acceleration in the motion of Pioneer 10 and 11, twin spacecraft that were launched by NASA in the 1970s and radar-tracked for over 30 years. Turyshev and his team have recovered files from NASA dumpsters, converted 1970s punch card data to digital, and spent untold man hours crunching numbers beamed to Earth decades ago from spacecraft billions of miles away.

Finally, the case is solved, and the villain is dead.

As the two spacecraft retreated into the distance, the data they beamed back showed that they were slowing down a little more than they should have been. Long vaunted as evidence that something was amiss in physics - perhaps that Einstein's theory of gravity was wrong - the anomaly spawned entire academic conferences and thousands of papers.

The mass extinction that opened the door for the rise of the dinosaurs about 201 million years ago may have been caused by a spike in carbon pumped into the atmosphere - most likely by methane released from the seafloor, a new study indicates.

This spike appears to have accelerated the climate change already under way, ultimately leading to the end-Triassic extinction, the researchers say.

Scientists already suspected that rapid warming and changes to ocean chemistry at the time killed off the dinosaurs' competitors, allowing their era to begin. And they knew that, at the time, eruptions of lava through fissures in the Earth's crust pumped carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

But this new study indicates that something more than the 600,000 years of eruptions, more massive than anything in human history, pushed about half of species to extinction.

For decades, scientists have known that DNA consists of four basic units -- adenine, guanine, thymine and cytosine. In recent history, scientists have expanded that list from four to six. Now researchers from the University of North Carolina School of Medicine have discovered the seventh and eighth bases of DNA.